This document relates to generation and control of laser pulses, including pulse compressor and laser pulse amplifiers and pulsed lasers.
Various optical amplifiers are designed to amplify light by providing an optical gain at the same wavelength of the light to be amplified so that the light, after transmitting through an optical gain medium of the optical amplifier, is amplified in its power or energy and the amplified light is at the same wavelength of the original light prior to the amplification. The optical gain of the optical amplifier can be obtained by pump light that optically excites the optical gain medium such as a Nd or Yb doped fiber amplifier, or by an electrically energized gain medium such as a semiconductor optical amplifier based on quantum wells and other gain mechanisms.
To minimize non-linear effects, the laser pulses are often stretched before amplification and compressed again after the amplification. A conventional pulse-compression method uses Chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) in which a CFBG fiber is spliced with a lead fiber transmitting the amplified laser pulses. The state-of-art fiber splicing uses a cleaving machine that requires a fiber lead length of about 0.1 to 1 meter. A major drawback of the conventional techniques is that the significant lead fiber length produces large non-linear effects which affect the quality of the output laser pulses.